This is a blog to follow up on a conversation started at a talk for planning students at Rutgers University. This line of thought was itself inspired by UPenn's Urban Design After the Age of Oil Conference (11.6 - 11.8 2008). This blog for the benefit of the students who where at the talk to respond -- I hope many will have found it interesting enough to post their thoughts.
The basic outline of the talk was
What's the problem?
1. Climate Change is HUGE
2. Urban Planning/Design responses (so far) seem to be mostly the tired stories we've been telling for the last 10? 15? years, and are puny in comparison to the scale of the climate change challenge.
3. How are we (urban planners & designers) to RAPIDLY respond and SCALE UP in the face of this challenge?
Is there something Planning can learn from Software?
The open source movement enabled development collaboration at an unprecedented scale, resulting in better software through MORE EYEBALLS, by building in PLATFORMS for the software/data to do more than the designers intended, and a certain faith in COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE to deliver unexpected and wonderful outcomes.
The proposition:
Planners should move away from the mode of "working for a client as an expert to deliver a solution to a problem" and toward a model in which:
* The planner acts as an enabler in a network of equally capable actors
* The planner builds frameworks instead of or in addition to plans
* The planner accepts a mandate to share data and methodology
Short post, lots of room for clarification in future discussions!
4 comments:
Can you post your slides and/or a summary of your talk?
I didn't do a ppt. Here's the summary.
A point that I wanted to make that didn't really come through in the talk is that planners tend to lament the fact that it's hard to get good plans implemented, but when it comes time to plan, they act as if implementation is not a concern. That leads me to ask: if it's hard to get plans implemented, wouldn't we get more mileage from our work if we focused less on making the perfect plan and spent more time making sure that even if the particular plan doesn't get implemented, we've left enough struts behind us that someone else can do something useful?
A couple of responses to the three prongs of your proposition (which each deserve a more in-depth discussion) -
Aren't planners already acting as enablers? Such as, when locals are the experts and the planners exist to sort through ideas and responses.
As for frameworks rather than plans: what do the budget-holders want? (I'm specifically thinking of planners working as consultants). I think many planners ideally want to create a sustainable process that can outlive their specific chunk of work, yet they are paid for Objective 2.1 followed by 2.2... etc. Rapid responses and scalability seem very hard when working for public bodies - so maybe it's not just the planners who need to change. Or the planners need to find a way to follow these ideas completely outside the existing workflow of cities and towns.
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